X58A-UD3R & X5670 Marriage

Hi, I have a X58A-UD3R Rev 1 with the latest non Beta BIOS F6. I purchased one of these Xeon chips because I heard they overclock easily, plus an extra two cores is always nice.

It booted straight up and loaded Windows without any issues, but when I went to overclock it, that's when I ran into a problem.

Where to begin...

Well, I guess I'll start at the beginning. I was following the same overclocking technique to what is used for an i7 930 i.e. isolate bclock from everything else and see how high that can go. So that's what I did, I reduced the multipliers for uncore, QPI, dram and CPU (keeping uncore x2 of DRAM). Failed to post.

Reset CMOS, try again

Then I decided to try to just overclock it to something completely random:

Well, this worked! I haven't run Prime95 or OCCT for more than 5 minutes each, but I've been using it for a few days and hasn't crashed... I'll run those two at some point if I can't get a better overclock.

bclock 200, DRAM x8 (1600), Uncore x16 (3200), QPI x36 (7200), CPU x20 Turbo on (but I think that settings doesn't apply in this case, I didn't see turbo kick in for this CPU if you set the multi to anything other than x22), DRAM 8 9 8 24 @ 1.54V, Vore Normal @ 1.225V, DVID 0.075V (vcore of 1.3V) - no post

the next day I tried:

bclock 200, DRAM x8 (1600), Uncore x16 (3200), QPI x36 (7200), CPU x21 Turbo on (but I think that settings doesn't apply in this case, I didn't see turbo kick in for this CPU if you set the multi to anything other than x22), DRAM 8 9 8 24 @ 1.54V, Vcore Normal @ 1.225V, DVID 0.075V (vcore of 1.3V) - no post

It seems I got really lucky with finding a setting that works, but I don't see any logic as to why it works and nothing else does.

I don't have my beeper connected to my motherboard, so I don't have any audio feedback, should probably figure out how to turn that on for some troubleshooting.

Anyway, if someone has a suggestion on what to try next, I'm all ears. I'm out of ideas .

EDIT: I installed the little Mobo Speaker to listen to error codes. No error codes, it doesn't even get to that point. The motherboard is doing various clicking sounds and goes into a loop but never gets far enough in the post to beep any kind of error code.